A conversation with Alex Dorr, author of How We Could, on why motivation is a symptom not a strategy, what a toddler’s face plant at the Dallas airport taught him about leadership, and the five-step framework that moves teams from drama to next right action.
The Silence That Changed Everything
Alex Dorr was in a room with 20 regional directors at a major retailer, and the energy was going nowhere. The issue seemed simple on the surface: a non-negotiable sales script that every team member was supposed to deliver to customers in their clothing stores. Some leaders were fully compliant and getting great results. Others thought the whole thing was pointless and were doing more or less whatever they wanted.
Rather than argue about it, Alex drew a box on the board. He put the goal at the top and started listing every excuse the resistant leaders offered around the outside of the box: the system going down, young staff who didn’t want to feel salesy, customers folding clothes. Twenty constraints in total, all visible, all validated. And then he held the goal steady and asked a single question: given all of that, how could we?
The room went quiet. People who had been looking at Alex as the problem shifted their attention to the visual in front of them. And then, from a corner of the room, someone said, “I can see it.” It was an answer that seemed to appear on its own once the constraints were named honestly and the goal was kept in place. “If you get reality clear enough,” Alex said, “the answer reveals itself.”
That moment is the spine of his new book, How We Could, and the framework he’s spent a decade building across hundreds of organizations. The difference between a team that stays stuck and one that finds a way forward, he argues, usually comes down to whether anyone gave them a framework for doing so.
Why Motivation Is the Wrong Starting Point
One of the more counterintuitive claims in the book is that leaders should spend less time trying to inspire or motivate their people and more time removing the drama that’s blocking the motivation that’s already there. Alex uses Michelangelo as his reference point. When asked how he carved the statue of David, the artist reportedly said he simply removed everything that wasn’t David. “I actually think that’s the best approach to leadership,” Alex said. “If you’re not motivated or inspired, you’re probably in some sort of drama.”
The implication is that a leader’s job isn’t to generate energy from scratch but rather to clear the path. When someone is stuck in an unpreferred reality, tangled in circumstances they didn’t choose and a story they’ve built around those circumstances, what they need is a framework that shows them there’s a way forward. “What people want right now is relief from their leaders,” he said. “But a lot of leaders don’t have a consistent framework to provide it.”
What Alex is describing is a leadership philosophy built on what he calls “the shadow of a leader.” Once a team internalizes the Call to Greatness framework, they start applying it before they even come to you. They’re five steps away from your desk, ready to vent, and they catch themselves. They know you’re going to validate their experience, help clean up their thinking, find their part in the mess, clarify their role, and point them toward next right action, so they skip the walk over and do it themselves.
The Five Steps
The Call to Greatness framework moves through five stages, and Alex is clear that skipping any of them tends to produce what he calls next wrong action rather than the right one.
The first step is to validate the experience. Before anything else, a leader has to earn the right to call someone forward by acknowledging what they’re actually dealing with, not with a lengthy processing session but with genuine recognition. “I have no right to call you up to greatness if I haven’t loved you up first,” he said.
Step two is cleaning up thinking. This is where the real work starts. Most people in a difficult situation are operating from a story that’s dirtier than the facts warrant. “I’m surrounded by idiots” is not a clean thought when you’re working alongside people with PhDs and decades of clinical experience. The cleaner version is something like: “I’m frustrated that this step of the process didn’t get followed.” It’s the same situation but an entirely different starting point for solving it.
Step three asks leaders to help someone find their part in the problem. Not to pile on or assign blame, but to surface accountability before moving into solution mode. Most conflicts, in Alex’s experience, involve more than one contributing factor. Acknowledging your part doesn’t mean the situation is your fault. Instead, it means you’re being honest about the full picture.
Step four is knowing your role in the solution, which Alex considers the biggest source of organizational drama right now. Most people are playing the wrong role for what the situation actually calls for. They’re consulting when they should be executing, or lobbying for a decision they don’t get to make, or waiting to be asked when the situation needs someone to just move.
Step five is taking next right action, which sounds obvious but gets skipped constantly. People complete the first four steps and then wait for someone else to do something. “You are the person,” Alex said. “We are the ones here to solve it.”
The ER Doctor and the $2.99 Solution
Chapter two opens with a story that Alex clearly still thinks about. His toddler face-planted off a suitcase at the Dallas airport, his blood everywhere and his teeth nowhere in sight. They rushed to the emergency room, and Alex wanted immediate action: surgery, reconstruction, or something equally dramatic.
But the doctor slowed everything down. “Let’s clean the wound first,” she said. “Let’s see what we’re actually working with.”
Alex was furious. And then they cleaned the wound and found a small cut on the lip. The doctor’s prescription was a $2.99 pacifier. Alex’s mental solution had been somewhere in the range of $80,000 and a surgical team. “From clean thinking comes next right action,” he said. “From unclean thinking comes next wrong action.” He’s watched this play out hundreds of times in organizations. It looks like leaders who keep taking action without slowing down to clean up their thinking first, stacking one wrong move on top of another, making the underlying problem harder to see and harder to solve.
Empathy as a Tool, Not a Destination
Alex draws a sharp distinction between empathy and sympathy that runs through the entire book. The analogy he uses is the ER again. If you come in with chest pains and the provider team responds to every symptom by saying “me too,” you’re going to realize pretty quickly that you aren’t getting any medical care. “What if your team is coming to you for leadership,” he said, “and starting to realize they aren’t getting any?”
Sympathy, in his framing, is when a leader gets so absorbed in a team member’s difficulty that they stop moving forward together. They validate the circumstance as a reason not to meet the standard, rather than as a constraint to navigate. Empathy, properly applied, is one sentence. “Dang, that’s so frustrating when you don’t get the information you need.” And then: given that, what would great look like?
He’s seen empathy get used as what he calls emotional blackmail, a way to keep the conversation in the venting stage indefinitely rather than moving toward action. “I found in many cases that using empathy as emotional blackmail was keeping people from moving into next right action.” Genuine acknowledgment and forward movement aren’t in conflict. One just has to follow the other.
The Most Expensive Employee in the Room
One of the sharpest lines in the book shows up in step three: the most emotionally expensive employee is a high performer who is constantly in judgment of the people they could be helping.
Alex calls this “getting righteous,” and it happens most often during change. A leader has a resistant minority making noise, usually two or three people out of a team of twelve, and the rest of the group starts to notice. Left unmanaged, the high performers who were already aligned start developing their own grievance: we do everything around here, and those people get away with nothing. Now you’ve lost twice. The group that was carrying the change has become high drama, and the whole initiative is more fragile than it was before.
His antidote is a simple reframe he tries to install in every organization he works with: stop judging, start helping. Instead of the aligned group working around the resistant members, invite them to reach out and bring those members along. Show them the new workflow. Walk them through the new process. The judgment, he argues, is almost always more expensive than the resistance.
Role Clarity as Conflict Prevention
The framework’s fourth step surfaces a problem Alex considers one of the biggest structural issues in organizations right now: most people don’t know what role they’re actually playing in any given decision.
He organizes it into three categories. Decision makers, who are rarer than most people think, are often a small committee or a single executive. Consultants, who offer options and analysis but don’t choose. And a good person to be informed, which is where Alex argues most of us sit most of the time, even when we don’t realize it.
“If you find yourself wondering, am I the decision maker on this, you’ve just discovered you probably aren’t.” The drama generated by role confusion is almost always avoidable. Someone lobbies hard against a direction they don’t get to change. Someone feels unseen because their ideas were heard and not adopted. Someone takes ownership of a decision that wasn’t theirs to make and creates conflict downstream. All of it traces back to the same gap: no one named the roles clearly before the work started.
His broader point is that most work, when done well, involves people following proven methodology rather than inventing something new. “I’m not the decision maker. I’m to be informed because I’m following our training.” That posture, applied consistently, takes enormous amounts of friction out of the system.
Think Inside the Box
The tool that anchors the whole book is deceptively simple: instead of asking teams to think outside the box, draw the box first. Put the goal at the top. Put the constraints on the outside. Then ask what’s possible inside it.
The reason thinking outside the box tends to fail, in Alex’s experience, is that it produces an argument with reality that teams lose every time. He tested this with a group early in his career, asked them for outside-the-box solutions, and watched the energy drain from the room as each idea ran into a constraint he hadn’t named. By the end, someone accused him of asking for input just to say no to everything. They were right. He hadn’t given them the box to work inside.
Once the constraints are visible and the goal is clear, something different happens. The answer tends to reveal itself, not because the leader planted it there, but because people can finally see the actual problem they’re solving. “Steve Jobs,” he said, “was so frustrated the phone had to fit in someone’s hand. That’s inside the box. The constraint was human biology.” What looks like outside-the-box thinking is often just a very clear-eyed view of what the box actually is.
The Bottom Line
What Alex keeps returning to across the book and across this conversation is a single underlying premise: drama is not a personality problem or a culture problem but a structural one. When people don’t have a consistent framework for moving from stuck to next right action, they fill the gap with venting, judgment, resistance, and role confusion. Give them the framework and most of that clears on its own.
“You’ll screw this up and only daily,” he wrote at the end of the book, a line he means as reassurance rather than warning. The goal isn’t to execute the five steps perfectly every time. It’s to toggle back to high self faster than you did before, to get back on track before the drama metastasizes. The leaders who do that consistently, he believes, are the ones their teams can actually rely on when things get hard.
Brandon Laws is the host of Transform Your Workplace and the VP of Marketing and Product at Xenium HR, an outsourced HR and payroll partner for small and mid-sized businesses in Portland, Oregon.